On April 13, 1984, I sent a letter to a small business owner named David Padden offering my services as executive director of the new organization he was creating. “I can bring to The Heartland Institute the talents of a jack-of-all-trades,” I wrote. Just as importantly, I said I was willing to work for the unprincely annual salary of $14,000.
Dave said yes, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Some of my peers in the public policy arena may be hoping that, at 18, Heartland will finally settle down and behave like other think tanks. I don’t think that’s in the cards, though. In the words of Alice Cooper, Heartland is just “in the middle of life … I’m eighteen and I like it!”
More Freedom, Less Government
The Heartland Institute’s mission has been the one constant in its 18-year history. We’ve expressed it in different ways over the years but it always comes down to two things: More freedom and less government. The most pressing problems facing society today do not arise from unfettered capitalism, religious intolerance, a debased popular culture, or changes in the natural environment. Rather, they can be traced to government infringement of our liberties.
Achieving more freedom and less government requires more than just talking about it. It means convincing those with political power to replace laws that limit individual freedom with policies that respect and expand individual rights and autonomy. This is what Heartland has been attempting to do for 18 years. We have stood for lower taxes, less regulation of businesses and personal lifestyles, respect for individual rights, and privatizing public services.
Not Business as Usual
During Heartland’s first three years of operation, we focused exclusively on state and local public policy issues in Illinois and imitated the publications and programs produced by such “beltway” think tanks as The Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. In 1987, our work brought us to the attention of Franklin Buchta in Wisconsin and then-state senator, now Governor John Engler in Michigan, who asked us to help start similar institutes in their states.
Our successes in Wisconsin and Michigan led us to establish offices in Ohio and Missouri as well. Soon we had offices in six cities in the Midwest producing a steady stream of policy studies and op-eds, hosting regular events, and otherwise raising our voices in public debates. We discovered that a “chain” of institutes could tap considerable economies of scale that small stand-alone institutes could not. The notion of franchising nonprofit think tanks, however, was a far cry from “business as usual” in public policy and philanthropic circles.
Except for Richard Larry at the Sarah Scaife Foundation and Tom Roe at the Roe Foundation, none of the major funders of think tanks supported us. Try as I might, I couldn’t convince them that franchising, which was revolutionizing the retail sector of the nation’s economy, was applicable to think tanks. Independent state-based think tanks, many of them modeled after Heartland and started with our assistance, were more successful in raising funds. So in 1993 we closed our branch offices, reconsolidated our resources in Illinois, and pondered what to do next.
Becoming a National Organization
We thought we knew of one promising market niche we were well suited to filling: being a source of research and commentary for the nation’s 7,315 elected state officials. None of the national free-market think tanks sent publications to this audience, and state-based think tanks had no way (and little reason) to bring their work to the attention of elected officials outside their states. But what should we send them?
Thanks to coaching by Jay and Ethelmae Humpheys, we decided to use the techniques of Total Quality Management to discover who our “customers” are and what they want from a free-market think tank. First, we asked scores of past and potential Heartland donors what we would have to do differently to persuade them to “add a zero” to their last contribution. The answer came back loud and clear: Give us evidence your efforts are actually making a difference, that all those publications and speeches are leading to changes in public policies.
Next we sat down with more than 100 state legislators and asked them what we had to do differently to become their “indispensable source of research and commentary.” They told us they were hungry for research and commentary on how to implement free-market policy reforms, but traditional think-tank publications (including ours) failed to meet their needs. They wanted the “best available research,” not just one person’s opinions. They wanted it delivered “just in time,” not when it was convenient for an academic or think tank to write it. They preferred news over opinions, and articles that were short and to the point, not academic or rhetorical.
A Public Policy Revolution
Altering Heartland’s programs to deliver what our customers said they wanted required nothing less than a revolution in how we conducted our business. We stopped relying on academics to determine our research agenda and started asking state legislators what they needed instead. Rather than focus on promoting our own research and writing, we created PolicyFax (now PolicyBot), an Internet-based clearinghouse for the work of other think tanks.
We launched three monthly single-issue newspapers—School Reform News, Environment & Climate News, and Health Care News—designed exactly the way legislators told us they wanted. We currently send all three, along with our bimonthly magazine, Intellectual Ammunition, to every state and national elected official. If you are an elected state official or member of Congress, you hear from The Heartland Institute nearly once a week.
We also created feedback loops to our customers: surveys aimed at elected officials on the back cover of every issue of Intellectual Ammunition, and surveys mailed to new and renewing donors and members asking for their input. Survey results are tallied quarterly and help shape every aspect of Heartland’s program, from the research agenda to who receives publications. We also regularly commission telephone surveys of randomly selected state legislators to see if they recognize us, use our publications, and think we’re credible.
It’s Working!
All this effort has paid off. Thanks largely to PolicyBot, Heartland’s Web site recorded more than 1 million visitor sessions and 12 million “hits” last year. A recent article in Z Magazine, a liberal publication, said “If ever a trendy phrase ‘just-in-time’ information has meaning, it is most assuredly illustrated by Heartland’s PolicyBot project.”
Our latest telephone survey of the nation’s state legislators, conducted in May 2002, found 86 percent of state legislators are familiar with Heartland, 48 percent have actually used one of our publications, and 60 percent consider Heartland to be a valuable resource or aid to them. Half said one or more of our publications influenced their opinion or led to a change in public policy.
These are huge numbers, well above any other public policy research organization in the survey, and even better on some questions than one of the leading membership organizations for state elected officials.
More Changes Ahead
The Heartland Institute is the only free-market advocacy group that regularly mails to every state elected official. State governments in the U.S. spend over $1 trillion a year. Isn’t it good to know at least one free-market organization is giving them the information they need, in formats they can use, to cut taxes and repeal unnecessary regulations?
I like where Heartland is at eighteen, but I also know we cannot afford to rest on our laurels. Traffic on our Web site has slowed, so we’re working on a top-to-bottom redesign to make PolicyBot and the rest of the site faster, easier to use, and more attractive. New issues, such as intellectual property rights, are emerging that our customers want to know more about. Every two years nearly a quarter of the members of our Legislative Advisory Board leave public service, so we must be continuously recruiting new members.
If you have suggestions on what Heartland should do to become more effective, please don’t hesitate to call me or contact me by email at [email protected]. I don’t ever want to lose the entrepreneurial spirit that has brought Heartland to where it is today.
Many thanks for your support over the years, and I hope to see you at Heartland’s Eighteenth Anniversary Benefit on October 23.
